


In search of home

by armethaumaturgy



Series: The effects of absence [1]
Category: Elsword (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Angst, Blood and Injury, M/M, one-sided Triadd, poor Esper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5359646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armethaumaturgy/pseuds/armethaumaturgy





	In search of home

The world slowly fades back.

Esper’s sight, blurred with the inky tears pouring freely, can’t focus on anything. He raises his blood-stained hands to wipe them off, but succeeds in little more than smearing more liquids across his pale face.

He chokes on his breath and it’s not because of the metallic smell — no, he doesn’t even smell that anymore, he simply chokes on another sob. More and more tear out of his throat, though, until he can’t even hear his pounding heart over their volume.

Her voice, her words, resonate within him, over and over. Each repeat feels like a new blade stabbed into his gut, tearing away at him with unmatched velocity. He hugs his stomach, bitten-away nails digging into his skin through the thin material of his suit.

_You shouldn’t have come here._

He grits his teeth, vainly trying to force down a whimper. A searing pain echoes somewhere behind his eyelids, more tears leaking from his eyes. When did he squeeze them shut?

_I am so disappointed in you, Add._

Was it his mother? Was it just another version of her? He… he doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know.

Cracks hum their distorted songs all around him, filling the desolated world with their gentle, pulsing light. Esper slides to his knees, doubling over himself as he cries, trying to overpower the repeating words with his own screams.

His throat burns and head hurts; he isn’t sure how long he stayed like that. His voice cracks and only pitiful whimpers come from his abused throat afterwards. He stares at the ground until his tears dry up and his breathing — somehow — regulates itself to the point where it doesn’t hurt to just breathe anymore.

_You should have known better._

Couldn’t she see? Couldn’t she understand how much he tried to fix everything? How long he’d searched for her?

No, this definitely hadn’t been her. Definitely,  _definitely_. He saw his younger self, after all.

Esper slowly picks himself off the ground. Dirt, blood, and his blackness stain most of his body, and he just wants it all to go away. He wants the whole world to go away, so he can go back to the times where nothing hurt this much.

He wants to go  _home_.

Almost in a trance, his feet carry him to the nearest crack.

* * *

He stumbles through the portal, unsteady feet almost sending him tumbling down. The laboratory is drenched in soft light of the monitors; it's slightly less messy than he remembers, but when he breathes in, the scent is absolutely unmistakable and he knows this really is home.

"Arc! Psych!" he calls out, face splitting into a grin. "I'm back!"

Whose lab is this? It's not his, definitely, and probably not Psych's, either. It's probably Arc's, judging from all the screens and holo-projectors. The components are neatly organized into labeled — not matter how badly written — boxex, too. Soft hum of the running computer fills the silence; the room is empty.

Esper leaves, going through the corridor until he comes to the conjoined kitchen/living room. His smile widens when he notices a figure standing by the counter in the kitchen.

"Arc!" he calls out, bounding towards the other.

Arc twists around at the sound of his voice. Esper stops, feet skidding to a halt a few paces in front of the inventor. Arc's hair is longer than it had been — by a fair margin — and is pulled up into a loose ponytail. His puffy jacket is gone and in its place is now a pristinely white coat, covering his dress shirt and vest.

Esper frowns in confusion, looking at the other. "Arc?"

The inventor looks him up and down with cold eyes, regarding him with a disgusted look when he takes notice of all the blood he's covered in.

"Time?" he asks, though he nods to himself as an answer almost immediately.

He stops when he notices the murky blackness seeping out of his wounds, small as they are.

"What's this?" he inquires, reaching out and scooping up a bit of the dark substance. Esper flinches and hisses as the fingers aggravate a wound, but Arc pays him no heed, holding the fingers up to closely examine his blood.

It clings to his white gloves and sticks together in a way that tar would. He seems absolutely fascinated by it. "What is this, Time?"

"My blood," Esper says. Arc is starting to disturb him, or maybe just the air he has around himself, so cold and analytical. Shouldn't the tracer have embraced him, just like usual? Surely he should've, even if he found Esper's blood interesting.

"Arc, I missed you," he says, stepping forward to hug the other.

Arc's face contorts into a grimace and he awkwardly pats Esper's back before pushing him away, looking down to make sure he didn't get blood on his clothes. Somehow, that stabs at Esper's insides more than the previous coldness and makes him want to cry.

"Don't call me that, Time," Arc says. "I'm now Mastermind."

"Oh," Esper utters quietly, looking away. It seems a lot has changed while he had been away. Arc's - Mastermind's - attitude is just a proof of that.

"Time, this is most interesting, though!" Mastermind says, motioning absently to his whole body - or his wounds, as it stands. His tone is of obvious curiosity, and Esper finds that saddening. "Will you let me study you?"

Esper knows the answer is already chosen for him before Mastermind even finishes the question. He couldn't deny the other this prime opportunity to study. Also, he knows that Arc - Mastermind, get it right! - had never let anything stop him from acquiring knowledge. The question was just a polite necessity. A laughable formality.

"Yeah," he nods slowly, biting his lower lip.

He had wanted to go home so badly, but is this really the home he wants?

* * *

Mastermind doesn't care.

It only took roughly seven minutes for Esper to understand that, and five of those were just trying to convince himself that he wasn't right. His body jolts on its own when the scalpel makes another precise cut along his unnumbed chest.

He stares up at the longer haired version of himself, having to blink away tears he hadn’t even known had collected in his eyes.

Darkness pools on the table around him, dripping from the numerous cuts, as well as the wounds from before. It’s less than pleasant, but still he holds still, lets Arc — Mastermind! — do as he pleases. Wiggling around would just irritate him. Another full syringe is taken.

He seems to lose the grasp on time while he lets Mastermind take as many samples of his blood as he seems fit. He can’t look at the stained vials; his insides start doing flips and it almost feels like he’ll puke.

Mastermind — the clean freak he’d always been — wouldn’t like that, though, so he refrains with every fiber of his being.

There is a whole line of the vials by the time Mastermind is finished, and Esper can’t even look in that direction. He feels groggy and sluggish; probably lost a little too much blood, but that doesn’t matter. Even if he told Mastermind, he knows — he feels — that the other wouldn’t have stopped.

Stumbling just a bit, he leaves the inventor’s lab in silence. No ‘see you’, no ‘thanks’, nothing from the other.

He’s not even two steps out of the lab before he bumps into someone else. He’s almost knocked down from the force, but somehow manages to hold himself with a hand to the wall.

“Mastermind?” the other asks, and Esper finally looks up from the floor. In front of him stands Psych, or… Add who used to be Psych.

“You’re not Mastermind,” he points out. “Who are you?”

“I’m Esper.”

Psych shrugs, then tsk’s, shoving the door to the inventor’s lab open. “Mastermind! Come and spar with me!” he demands, grinning widely as he peers into the room.

“I refuse,” Mastermind replies immediately, already pipeting a drop of the blood onto a glass to investigate under the microscope.

“Why do you gotta be such a killjoy all the time?” Psych whines, though it sounds more like a growl than anything else. Esper’s brows knit together unconsciously.

“Just take Time.”

“Time?”

“Hello,” Esper pipes up, quietly. “It’s been a while, Psych.”

Psych does a double take on him, examining him with enough intensity to make him fidget. “Oh! You changed so much, I didn’t recognize you!” the brawler laughs. “But that means you got stronger, right? Come and spar me!”

And again, the decision had already been made up for him, because even if all the cells in his body screamed at him to hide away and rest, he found himself saying “Sure.”

Psych had always had that charm.

* * *

 Esper grits his teeth against crying out. Psych’s — Lusa’s, as it turns out — fighting style is filled with so much force that Esper is finding it hard to even hold his ground.  


He gives the ‘spar’ all he has, though — he knows the other wouldn’t be satisfied otherwise. But the numerous bruises already blooming wildly on his pale skin make it harder than he’d wish.

He’s also still feeling rather lightheaded from the earlier blood loss. When he looks down, his hands are shaking.

He looks at Lusa and gulps at the frenzied look in the other’s eyes. There’s bloodlust, and more of it than Esper would like ever seeing. Especially aimed at him.

Lusa laughs, and for a moment Esper thinks he is about to strike again, but he just keeps laughing. “That was good!” he exclaims, grinning so sharply his canines show. “I look forward to our next match!”

And with that, Esper’s left alone, the brawler retiring back inside the building.

Esper’s chest heaves with his breaths, and he barely keeps himself upright. Just… just what happened with the two after he’d gone away?

Surely, surely, this couldn’t be who they became.

Surely, it’s just some error.

* * *

He can’t remember the last time he had slept. Or the last time when he wasn’t in pain. Or how he ended up in the living room. What is he doing in the living room?

There’s a mug of steaming coffee in his hands; it’s dark and strong and he hates coffee like that but that’s the only thing keeping him awake so he bears it and gulps the awfully bitter liquid down with just a minimal wince.

His muscles twitch sporadically from overexertion. He guesses Lusa had been hitting him pretty hard. He’s not sure, he had tuned everything out somewhere mid-battle. That might be why he’s covered in more bruises than usual; probably didn’t manage to dodge as well while on autopilot.

He stares down at the black leftover at the bottom of his mug, frowning at it as if it were responsible for this whole mess.

When it becomes obvious that doing so won’t help him in any way — and it does take a while — he sets the mug down and looks at the clock. The hands spell out eleven forty-two in the night.

He steels himself as he begins his trek to Mastermind’s laboratory. The scientist had asked for him to ‘help out’ again, and… who was he to say no?

He passes by Lusa on his way, and almost on instinct, smiles at the other. Lusa, still wet from his shower and drying his hair with a towel absently, doesn’t even acknowledge his existence. The smile falls off like it had been shot down, and Esper knocks on Mastermind’s door softly.

The scientist welcomes him with a grumble and an order to sit down, and something within Esper aches.

 _Home is where the heart is_ , a thought runs through him.

Then, he thinks, then his home was with Arc and Psych. No matter that they turned out to be… these two… Because his home definitely wasn’t with these two. It was definitely with the Tracers.

Though, he supposes he will have to make do with what he has been given. After all, there is no way to return to a specific past, as he had found out.

He smiles sadly as Mastermind brandishes his scalpel.


End file.
